Erica R. Meiners details the interlocking structural processes that connect the prison industrial complex (PIC) and education. Critiquing and building on the school-to-prison pipeline literature, Meiners offers a nuanced analysis of the racialized and gendered ideological constructions that normalize mass incarceration while simultaneously legitimating unjust educational policy and practices. The school-to-prison pipeline literature "tracks links between the public schooling system and the PIC to chart how youth of color are, as [Garret Albert] Duncan has termed it, 'racially profiled' to be materially and conceptually moved from schools to jails" (p. 31). However, according to Meiners, "Linkages between schools and jails are less a pipeline, and more a persistent nexus or a web of intertwined, punitive threads. This nexus metaphor . . . captures the historic, systemic, and multifaceted nature of the intersections of education and incarceration" (p. 32). Meiners's main source of insight stems from her professorship within a teacher-training program that collaborates with prison-based programs in Chicago. Located within the academic activist trajectory of Angela Davis, Meiners advocates for prison abolition and provides a detailed critique of the effects of the normalization of the PIC on schools.Meiners's ability to map the connections between the PIC and education is facilitated through a comprehensive analysis that includes black feminism, carceral studies, racial formation theory, media studies, and cultural studies in education. Although not an anthropologist, her work builds on the common practice within contemporary social anthropology to utilize cross-disciplinary insight to provide a thorough analysis of complex issues. As a philosophical guide, Meiners utilizes Charles Mills' theoretical intervention of the "Racial Contract." This intervention helps to explain the historic and current racial and gendered projects that facilitate the ideological construction of black people into the role of "Public Enemies," while validating the moral fiber and integrity of white people.Pointing out the historic white feminization of the teaching profession, Meiners outlines the structural analysis of the movement of black bodies from systems of education into the PIC. Drawing a historical map to current racial manifestations within schools and the PIC Meiners claims, "White women were essential to the survival and development of the nation and the dissemination of particular ideologies" (p. 46). Although current white supremacist projects have transformed into discourses pertaining to individual merit, white women in schools act as ideological stewards of these processes. Meiners argues that given the social credence of the "individual" rather than structural factors that often determine life outcomes, society as a whole has increasingly become a prison. She states, "Prisons, like detention in schools, provide a place for the bad people to go, thus extending a value system that isolation and punishment are 'just' respons...
Masculinity Lockdown is an ethnographic study that analyzes the construction of Black masculinity at Southeast County High School (SCHS) in Southern California. Specifically, the article examines how three young Black males at SCHS navigate amidst a social milieu established by the school that denies the assertion of race and simultaneously fosters a homophobic understanding of masculinity. Through ethnographic accounts, the piece details how explicit utilization of violent, sexist rhetoric encourages Black males to participate within a masculine performance that serves reinforce their oppression.
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